horror

We know how most stories are supposed to start. A child is given a choice to leave their home in favor of a fantastical journey that will forever change them. This is known as the “call to adventure.”

In Sarah Jolley’s The Property of Hate, that call is made by a sardonic carnival barker with a television set for a head. Still with me? Good.

The Property of Hate, like many adventure stories, features a vibrant and imaginative world full of wondrous creatures and characters. But unlike most adventure stories, our protagonist, a child known only as “The Hero,” has no idea what she’s doing there or why. Blithely following her guide (the aforementioned TV-headed man named RGB) into a realm where existence is literally dictated by thought and imagination, The Hero soon comes to realize that she is trapped in a place where ideas can actually kill you. On top of all this, it appears that this magical world is on the verge of collapsing, with The Hero trapped inside.

Unlike the cheesy Young Adult novels that revolve around a love triangle, Conspiracy of Angels starts off with a bang. The main character, Zack Westland, wakes up on the shores of Lake Erie with amnesia. As the story progresses, he discovers that he’s part of a tribe of angels and it is up to him to stop another war between the clans from starting.

Although all of this sounds very cliché, Belanger makes it work. She deftly avoids stereotypes and peppers her novel with characters that will keep you glued to the pages. For example, Zack Westland is more concerned about discovering his past and trying to decipher his psychic experiences than falling in love. There’s also a fascinating twist about how immortal angels are able to inhabit human bodies while retaining their ability for living eternally.

If there is anything certain about screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s The Dionaea House: Correspondence from Mark Condry, initially written as a web pitch to a yet-unmade movie, it is that piercing horror best takes hold through evocative fragments, through investigating the silent dead ends and meticulously stirring a sense of authenticity.

The tale begins with emails from Eric’s adolescent friend Mark, who writes of receiving an unsolicited newspaper clipping naming one of their former friends as the culprit in a gruesome public murder of a married couple in Boise, Iowa.

The circumstances of the shooting are peculiar, and after Mark’s investigation into his friend’s murders leads to his ultimate disappearance, Eric posts all the emails on the web, “in hopes that you’ll better understand why he did what he did.”

Halloween may be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep celebrating with a delightfully depraved webcomic! Known for her dark humor, creepy imagery, and love of all things horrifying, cartoonist Abby Howard weaves a gruesome spell in her gory adventure-comedy The Last Halloween.

Unbeknownst to humanity, there exists a parallel dimension just beyond the shadows, populated by nightmarish monsters (one for every human born). For eons the monsters have been relegated to a half-existence, all of them dreaming of the chance to murder their human counterparts, an act which grants them immortality. The only thing keeping them at bay is an enigmatic peacekeeper known as the phagocyte. But on this Halloween night, someone has decided to remove the phagocyte from his post, and unleashed bedlam on the Earth.

It’s Horror Week on (The) Absolute! We’re reposting some of our spookiest, creepiest recommendations every day leading up to Halloween. Enjoy!

In celebration of Halloween, I managed to get ahold of a copy of White Day: A Labyrinth Named School. The title sounds innocuous enough, but it’s one of those Internet legends about a horror game so scary the developers had to release patches to tone it down because people complained. Rumor has it that it helped inspire Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

White Day starts off simple. A young boy wants to gift his crush So-yeong with chocolates on White Day, an Asian holiday in which boys reciprocate or demonstrate affection for the girls they like. Boy Valentine’s Day, basically. To do this, he sneaks into school after hours and somehow ends up crawling through the vents, at which point he spies the janitor beating another student to death…and that’s just the start of the insanity.

It’s Horror Week on (The) Absolute! We’re reposting some of our spookiest, creepiest recommendations every day leading up to Halloween. Enjoy!

With Halloween around the corner, I expect to run into lots of horror themed art with conventional themes, but comics artist Sarah Horrocks‘s collection of horror movie fan art has that slight atypical touch that I like. Drawn earlier this year for her “Horror Movie of the Day” challenge, each illustration is an homage to a particular horror film. But instead of choosing the obvious horror movies, like The Shining or whatever, she sticks with indie or foreign titles, giving her illustrations a slight edge that goes well with her sketchy, unpolished style. Out of all her movie sketches, the only one of them I’ve seen is In My Skin, and judging by Sarah’s illustration, you can see why I’ll never watch that movie again.

It’s Horror Week on (The) Absolute! We’re reposting some of our spookiest, creepiest recommendations every day leading up to Halloween. Enjoy!

We’re big lovers of interactive fiction, and Dave Morris’ reimagined version of Frankenstein is a real treat for those who love discovering new, original approaches to storytelling. Created for iPad and iPhone, the novel puts you in direct contact with main character Dr. Victor Frankenstein as you’re asked questions that steer his actions. After each paragraph, you’re given prompts that allow you to choose where the novel will go. Although all choices lead to the same inevitable conclusion, the journey is what makes Frankenstein an interesting experience. You have the power to condemn the doctor or reassure him (through dialogue), and as you travel across the world looking for Frankenstein’s monster, maps and old school anatomical drawings from the 17th century give the novel a sense of place and mood. Although the prose can feel stilted and overwrought at times, in the realm of tablet fiction, this one is an absolute must. Head over to Inkus Studios to test drive it before you buy.